A website and blog that celebrates the highly individualistic music of the fascinating French composer Florent Schmitt (1870-1958) — as well as the scholars and musicians who study and perform his works.

During his lengthy career, the French composer Florent Schmitt would periodically turn to the subject of children for musical inspiration – often involving pieces written for piano. In the early 1900s Schmitt composed four collections of piano duets featuring easy primo parts for young pupils. Sur cinq notes (1906); Trois pièces récréatives (1907); Huit courtes pieces […]

Available in mid-January 2017, the boxed set includes all 14 compositions first released in 2012-13 … now at a special price of four CDs for the price of two. Several years ago, the Grand Piano label issued a series of four CDs that together make up the complete original works for piano duet and duo by […]

For music-lovers who aren’t very familiar with the music of Florent Schmitt, they may well think that the composer is German. Or at the very least, they might assume that the music bears a strong resemblance to Germanic musical style. Of course, for those who know Schmitt and his artistry, they realize that any “German” musical influence falls well-behind French influence […]

While the French composer Florent Schmitt wrote vast quantities of music for solo and duo-pianists, the concertante pieces he composed for piano and orchestra are few. In fact, there are just two of them. One is the Symphonie Concertante, a daringly modern work Schmitt composed in 1931 on commission from Serge Koussevitzky and the […]

To say that Vincent Larderet is one of the most accomplished of the younger generation of classical pianists would be an understatement. As a Steinway Artist, Mr. Larderet has attracted international recognition by virtue of the exceptional intensity of his performances and commercial recordings, praised by critics not only in his native France but also in Continental […]

One of the most satisfying of Florent Schmitt’s extensive trove of music for piano duet and duo – and the one that is my personal favorite of all of them – is Trois Rapsodies, Op. 53, a work he composed in 1903-4. Made up of three movements titled Française, Polonaise and Viennoise, it is a work that fully engages […]

One of the most intriguing recent projects involving the music of French composer Florent Schmitt is the complete music for two pianos and piano duet, recorded by the Invencia Piano Duo (Andrey Kasparov and Oksana Lutsyshyn). These works have been released on the Grand Piano label over the past year, with the final two installments […]